New Folks' Home: And Other Stories (The Complete Short Fiction of Clifford D. Simak Book 6) Read Online Free

don’t want the coffee. If I can just make it to the bed.
    He pulled himself tenderly from the chair and crawled into the bedroom. By slow and painful maneuver, he stripped off his sodden clothing and got into the pajamas that had been folded on the pillow.
    There was a bathroom off the bedroom and by hopping from bed to chair to dresser he finally reached it.
    Something to kill the pain, he told himself. Aspirin would be of some little help if he could only find one.
    There was a medicine cabinet above the basin and he jerked it open, but the shelves were empty.
    After a time he made it back to the bed again and crawled beneath the covers, switching off the bedside light.
    Lying stiff and straight, shivering with the effort of getting into bed, he wondered dully what would happen when the owner should return and find a stranger in the bed.
    But he didn’t care. He was beyond all caring. His head was large and fuzzy and he guessed he had a fever.
    He lay quietly, waiting for sleep to come to him, his body fitting itself by slow degrees into the strangeness of the bed.
    He did not even notice when the lights throughout the house went out.
    He awoke to the morning sun, streaming through the windows. There was the odor of frying bacon and of brewing coffee. And a telephone was ringing, loudly and insistently.
    He threw off the covers and was halfway out of bed to answer the telephone when he remembered that this was not his house, that this was not his bed, that the ringing phone could not possibly be for him.
    He sat upon the edge of the bed, bewildered, as the memory of the day before came crashing in upon him.
    Good Lord, he thought, a phone! There can’t be a phone. Way out here, there can’t.
    But still it kept on ringing.
    In just a little while, he thought, someone would come to answer it. The someone who was frying bacon would come and answer it. And when they did, they’d go past the open door and he would be able to see them and know to whom the house belonged.
    He got out of bed. The floor beneath his feet was cold and there might be slippers somewhere, but he didn’t know where to look for them.
    He was out in the living room before he remembered that he had a twisted ankle.
    Stopping in amazement, he looked down at it and it looked as it had always looked, no longer red or purple, and no longer swollen. And most important, not hurting any more. He could walk on it as if nothing had ever been the matter with it.
    The phone standing on the table in the hall pealed aloud at him.
    “I’ll be damned,” said Frederick Gray, staring at his ankle.
    The phone brayed at him again.
    He hurried to the table and snatched the handpiece off the cradle.
    “Hello,” he said.
    “Dr. Frederick Gray, perhaps.”
    “You are right. I am Frederick Gray.”
    “I trust you had a restful night.”
    “A very restful one. And thank you very much.”
    “Your clothes were wet and beyond repair. We disposed of them. I hope that you don’t mind. The contents of the pockets are on the dressing table. There is other clothing in the closet that I am sure will fit you.”
    “Why,” said Frederick Gray, “that was very thoughtful of you. But would you mind telling me—”
    “Not at all,” the caller said, “but perhaps you’d better hurry out and get your breakfast. It will be getting cold.”
    The phone went dead.
    “Just a minute,” Gray yelled at it. “Just hold on a minute—”
    But the buzz of an empty line kept sounding in his ear.
    He hung up and went into the bedroom, where he found a pair of slippers tucked beneath the bed.
    We hope you had a restful night. Your clothes were wet, so we disposed of them. We put the contents of the pockets on the dressing table.
    And who in the world were we?
    Where was everyone?
    And what happened, when he slept, to repair the ankle?
    He had been right the night before, he thought. It was an empty house. There was no one here. But in some manner which he could not fathom, it still